Library partnership works for everyone

Branch in Otay Ranch Town Center draws shoppers; stores get some book browsers

CHULA VISTA  Six years ago, residents in eastern Chula Vista saw their long-cherished hopes for a local library slip into the black hole of a deep economic recession.

Books had already been purchased, and shovels were ready to dig into the dirt for the Rancho del Rey library, when the bottom fell out of the economy — and with it the plans for the library.

Five years later, the city’s economy and financial situation hadn’t improved enough to revisit the original plans, but something bordering on the miraculous happened: The library was allowed to set up shop in the Otay Ranch Town Center food pavilion for a mere $1 per year. The opening of the Otay Ranch Town Center location in April 2012 capped off five years of attempts to serve the growing Eastlake population. It also marked the beginning of what in one year has become arguably one of the most prominent and successful partnerships between a public agency and a private organization in San Diego’s South Bay.

“We knew that the partnership with the library would be a good one in many ways,” said Tina Medina, senior marketing manager for Otay Ranch Town Center. “We didn’t expect the amount of popularity. We didn’t know that this many people would be using the library on a regular basis.”

The Friends of the Chula Vista Public Library Foundation was also there for many of the trials and errors, and pitched in $50,000 to get the new mall-based branch off the ground.

A year later, Chula Vista Library and Recreation Director Betty Waznis says, the unusual arrangement seems to be working for the library, the mall and the patrons. The library gets visitors who might not have gone out of their way to a library, but stopped in because it was near their shopping. The mall gets more foot traffic from patrons who do go out of their way for the library, it is able to fill what was previously a vacant commercial space, and the library’s love for programs is a boon for the program-oriented mall. And residents win because it’s efficient. They can get their shopping, their farmers market buying and their literature fix all in one place.

“The public love our branch, because it gives them a chance to combine multiple trips into one,” Waznis explained.

Medina agreed.

“It’s always nice to see the patrons in the library with shopping bags, because I think that really speaks to the success of the partnership,” she said.

The branch has had more than 112,000 visitors and circulated more than 135,000 books and other items in its first year. Perhaps more telling, though, are the numbers for the overall system. Attendance to new programs is up more than 40 percent, new cards are up 21 percent and the system’s total circulation is up 9 percent.

Of course, that’s the short version of the story. Waznis says that even coming up with the idea, and then getting the mall and its parent company to agree, were accomplishments in themselves. The idea of renting retail space was “pretty far out there,” she acknowledged, and the idea of renting retail space for practically nothing was even more far-fetched.